Looking for MythTV assistance. My brain is exploding.

[DrJohnZoidberg]

I have now officially searched the entire internet on how to fix my problem to no avail.

I have set up mythtv backend, everything works great in the frontend, except I get no sound.

I am using a analog tuner and have tried using a cable from the tv card output to line in on my soundcard - this does not work. I can monitor the sound if I unmute the line channel, but mythtv is not recording any audio.

I have tried just to use alsa devices to route the audio to my onboard sound card, I have tried to use a .asoundrc file and without one. NOTHING is working.

I have found an official wiki that uses my exact tv tuner chipset to explain how to use ALSA: plughw as the sound device, but this doesn't work.

It keeps on telling me (in the log files) that the device or resource is busy and cannot access it.

I can play sound file through the devices if I use aplay in the command line.

I am using Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit, if anybody thinks they have any info that may help, please just post here. At the moment I will try anything!

I will post all system outputs and log entries here when I get home.

 

[SlickNick]

I once got that with a different app in Ubuntu. What I did, based on some forum advise somewhere on the inet, was to disable the Ubuntu sounds. And anything else that wants to use the sound, and voila, it worked. I dunno if it'll be that simple for you though, but it's worth a try.

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

I once got that with a different app in Ubuntu. What I did, based on some forum advise somewhere on the inet, was to disable the Ubuntu sounds. And anything else that wants to use the sound, and voila, it worked. I dunno if it'll be that simple for you though, but it's worth a try.

Thanks for the reply, but this does not remedy my problem.

I've never set up mythtv until now, is it always this damn complicated? There is also no definitive documentation available, everything is scattered far and wide. I think I may just give up.

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

Ok, wow finally managed to get it working. 2 weeks I was searching for these three lines:

script
      PULSE_INTERNAL=1 exec /usr/bin/mythbackend --logfile /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log --user mythtv
end script

I'm happy now

 

[Willie Trombone]

Quick Qs for the mythtv fundis...
What cpu is required, will it run reasonably on an older CPU?
Is it really necessary to get a tuner / caputre card with onboard processing, or is one of the software cards OK?
What do you think of using a vid machine as the tuner and an ordinary capture card / usb dongle? Do you lose alot of functionality? Like is there a MythTV xml schedule to download somewhere?

TIA!

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

Quick Qs for the mythtv fundis...
What cpu is required, will it run reasonably on an older CPU?
Is it really necessary to get a tuner / caputre card with onboard processing, or is one of the software cards OK?
What do you think of using a vid machine as the tuner and an ordinary capture card / usb dongle? Do you lose alot of functionality? Like is there a MythTV xml schedule to download somewhere?

TIA!

I'm not too sure on min requirements, but if you have a hardware encoder on the tuner you can obviously get away with a much slower system. I really don't think you need a beefy system (I'm running a Intel dual core e6300 2.8ghz with a software tuner and there is absolutely no sign of any slowdown).

So my first response sort of answers your second question; hardware encoder will be better for older hardware. Maybe you should just tell us what cpu you are intending to use.

What do you think of using a vid machine as the tuner and an ordinary capture card / usb dongle? Do you lose alot of functionality?

You will lose the functionality of being able to schedule recording for certain channels as everything will be on one line and you will have to change it externally on the vid machine. If you have a dstv decoder I guess it doesn't make much difference anyway.

MythTV xml schedule to download somewhere?

http://zaxmltv.flash.za.org/

 

[milomak]

videocards and processing power - http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU#Supported_Cards
for a tv card - ensure it has hardware encoding
cpu - something in the c2d range should be fine (oh i see an e6300 does the job as well)

 

[Willie Trombone]

Awesome, thanks guys... any mythtv fundis ex Tivo fundis? Will I be disappointed having enjoyed Tivo for 5 or more years? TIA!